Dual-booting worked OK, screen looks good and graphics was good during initialization, until Password screen came-up then all the screen become covered with uniform shades sort of like a window blind covering a house-window.

I think the video card (chipset), is a little bit old, and there were problems with the drivers on older nvidia cards a few months ago. Those driver problems may have been fixed in the latest versions, so, I would try one of the recent sabayon releases at:http://torrents.sabayon.orgI like kde so I would probably get this one:http://torrents.sabayon.org/file?info_h ... %16H%7B%07If you prefer gnome, or a lightweight DE, they are right there too. If they run as a live dvd, you could install it. If it still works good after the installation, do an upgrade, and that might be where the driver problem shows up. It would require you to install an older nvidia driver...not too difficult. But, I think it will survive the upgrade with no problem.

Any flavor of Sabayon should work. I don't know what has caused the problem in Ubuntu installation, but i would not recommend using Gnome3 (because of previous problems in Ubuntu and i personally dont like Gnome3 ).

Try KDE (if you would like rather fancy envoronment with eyecandy) or XFCE (if you would prefer something rather simple and lighter (it's similar to Gnome2) with possible eyecandy if you wish) or MATE (Gnome2 clone) edition.

I wouldn't recommend LXDE for a while because it is merging with Razor-qt - I'm waiting what is the result going to be like

I would recommend XFCE. I had the least problems with that. If you can figure out how to start that on Sabayon, Gnome 3 Classic might be a good choice too. MATE is like a stripped down version of Gnome 2.

For a while a used Cinnamon on a Sabayon MATE installation, but cinnamon stopped working after a few upgrades. E17 would also be an alternative.